by Alan Carr
When people ask me how I got into stand-up I politely point them to my first autobiography, which is still available in all good bookstores. For those who are too tight or too thick to get the hint and who just stand there, I explain it to them instead. The first two or three years you don’t get paid plus you have to pay for your own travel and you usually get back in the early hours of the morning. I never had a car in Manchester so would often have to get the night train, where it would just be me and a flasher chug-chug-chugging across the Pennines. Then you get up and go to work to do your proper job. The people I’m explaining this to soon glaze over and walk away. They always seem a bit despondent that there isn’t an easier way – that someone doesn’t just spot you, pluck you from obscurity and plonk you on the stage, microphone in hand, and TV comes a-calling, but sadly that isn’t the case.
Trying to explain all this, it dawned on me that I don’t even know how I got here – it does seem a hell of a lot of hard work. How did I, possibly the least ambitious person you could ever find, put up with the early days? It doesn’t feel like me. It feels like I’m telling someone else’s story. Really? The person who can’t be arsed to go to the offie for a bottle of wine if it’s raining – who will just drink something out of the cupboard that he nicked from the Chatty Man drinks globe – was the same person who would do a four-and-a-half-hour round trip to perform in Newark, get booed off, come home after earning no money and get up to go to the call centre and then go out the next night to perform again? Alan, was that you?
I’m in a wonderful position now where I get offered scripts and formats to read and I do always read them, reread them and scrutinize them. Will it work? Is it ‘me’? Is it entertaining? These questions swim endlessly around my head, so it’s strange to think that when I got offered the chance to co-host the The Friday Night Project in the late autumn of 2005 I just said ‘yes’. Just ‘yes, why not?’ In for a penny, in for a pound. Simple. As. That. I hadn’t even watched it when I agreed – can you believe it? Not that I was being deliberately offhand or blasé but I was riding high after a critically acclaimed Edinburgh, I got five stars and everything – there’s no need to clap – and I was working every night, performing my stand-up all over the place. I didn’t have time for telly, darlings, I had to whip an arts centre in Hull into a comedy frenzy. All I knew was that Justin Lee Collins and I were replacing Rob Rouse, Jimmy Carr and Sharon Horgan as hosts. I’d got very close to hosting my own telly show earlier when I’d got down to the last handful to host Big Brother’s Big Mouth on Channel 4 and eventually lost out to Russell Brand, who in my opinion rightfully won – his mercurial mind and boundless energy was just perfect for that show. Sometimes, though, in my darker moments, as I’m sitting here on my couch, hungover, watching the rain pitter patter up against the window, sipping a cup-a-soup, I wonder if maybe I had got the job instead of Russell it would be me living as a vegan Buddhist in Hollywood, strutting up Sunset Boulevard in my skinny-fit jeans and trying to bring capitalism to its knees, but hey ho, it wasn’t to be.
Initially we had some run-throughs at the Princess offices, the production company behind The Friday Night Project, which are bizarrely situated on the top floor of a shopping centre in west London – you’d go in for a meeting and come out with ‘bits’. The run-throughs went well, the team were young and enthusiastic, bursting with fantastic fresh ideas as young people seem annoyingly able to do, and I got on with Princess. Most importantly, JLC and I gelled. Once all that was done, we were shown on a laptop a 3D mock-up of what the set would look like. I don’t know if you remember those huge, eight-foot tall, dotted, almost Seurat-influenced portraits of me and Justin – they were behind us in the sofa area – well, when I saw them on the laptop screen all of a sudden the shit got real. We would do eight shows with us as the new hosts and then Channel 4 would either scrap the whole damn thing or recommission it.
It was all very exciting and the last thing I had to do that year before Christmas came was to have my clothes fitting with the stylist so they could all be ready, pressed and hanging on a rail in my dressing room ready for when we started filming in early January. The stylist normally dressed Girls Aloud and the Sugababes so God knows what he thought when he saw me waddle through the door – for a start my leg was the width of Nicola Roberts – but he never let on and foolishly took all my measurements down and hotfooted it to Oxford Street to shop till he dropped. Yes, you read right, I said foolishly, because the poor sod had no idea what Christmas does to my body. It’s all right him jotting down in his notebook on 23 December 34-inch waist but by 4 January it’ll be a whole different ball game – oh yes. Non-stop eating and no exercise, all washed down with gallons of red wine over the Christmas period will leave my buttons squeaking, my zips bursting and my belt chafing. And to add to the (cake) mix, unbeknownst to them I was going to Italy with my then flatmate Hayley for a cheeky break before the show got up and running. God, I love Italy – the women are fit, the men are fit, the wine is fit and what’s more the food is fit, so as you can imagine Christmas plus Italy equalled Diabetes Type Duo. I came back literally huge. There is a photo in St Mark’s Square that I must dig out of me wearing a pink tracksuit and looking like a pig – an actual pig that in some weird re-enactment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm has got up on to his hind legs and decided to go sightseeing. When I arrived back for the first show the stylist couldn’t believe his eyes. The inevitable had happened and I couldn’t fit into any of my clothes. The shirt that pre-Christmas had been loose and flappy now clung to my body like a fitted sheet. The trousers wouldn’t even get over my thighs: one yank from the stylist and the zip burst and the legs ripped round my calves – I looked like David Banner at the start of one of his rages. I feel stupid retelling this, I feel ungrateful. What a wonderful opportunity I’d been given and I didn’t even recognize it. Most presenters get match fit, get a personal trainer, hit the gym, cut out the carbs so they can look their best – and there’s me on record day being smothered in Bertolli butter so I can squeeze into my trousers. Unsurprisingly, I looked like shit, a fat shit in fact.
Apart from looking like a Richmond sausage in a cardie, it didn’t help that I had decided to get my hair cut while I was in Italy, all ready for the show. One extra thing to cross off the list for when I get back, I’d said to myself, patting myself on the back for my resourcefulness. Those black-and-white photos of serial killers from the seventies that they place in barber shop windows, I thought they were exclusive to British hairdressers. Well, apparently not – it’s Italy too. The trouble was, I knew very little of the Italian language and the barber didn’t know any English and instead of saying scusa and making a sharp exit I thought I’d grin and bear it. Over here, if you can’t explain the hairstyle you desire there are normally a selection of celebrity magazines fanned out on a nearby coffee table that you can flick through to find an appropriate hairdo. There wasn’t even that to guide him – all he had on his coffee table was a solitary property magazine with a Tuscan farmhouse and a couple of olive trees on the front. After trying to communicate ‘a little trim’, only for him to brandish a pair of clippers rather menacingly, I reached for the magazine and tried my best whilst doing the universal sign for short. I pointed to a hedge that if it was attached to the side of my head would be the kind of length that I was after. This charade went on until I eventually capitulated and let him ‘do his worst’. Grinning, he carried on – snip snip snip. He cut everything short apart from the back of my head where he left a rat’s tail. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse he emptied a tub of ‘wet-look’ gel on top of it. Can I just get this off my chest – why does anyone want ‘wet look’? What’s the appeal? Why do I want my hair to look like I’m really really sweaty or have just been caught in a downpour? Thank you. After emptying the tub, he then smiled some more and added insult to injury by moulding my hair into a point like a walnut whip. With a flourish, he removed the towel from round my neck. It was time to pay. Totally unhappy
and yet totally British, I paid up and gave him a tip, and walked out of the hairdresser’s with my head looking like a Tuscan villa – a fat Tuscan villa. So for my first ever Friday Night Project, let’s just say that I wasn’t looking my best. Thankfully, the make-up girl who was also a hairdresser was able to salvage my hair, freeing my rat’s tail from the nape of my neck and releasing it into the pedal bin for a new life.
The first Friday Night Project I did was with guest host Billie Piper, who at that time was more famous for being the Doctor Who assistant rather than the high-class hooker Belle de Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl, so we did ‘Doctor Who on Ice’ at an ice-skating rink on Hampstead Heath with her. Talk about easing yourself gently into a show. For a start, I was really nervous because it was my first piece for the new show; secondly, I’d never watched an episode of Doctor Who in my life; thirdly, I’d never ice-skated before; fourthly, it was all going to be filmed; fifthly – do I need a fifth example? – I was bricking it!! You know when you start a new job and it’s your first day and the boss says ‘You couldn’t just nip to Pret and get me a crayfish and avocado salad could you?’ And you have to walk twenty minutes out of your way but you smile and say yes even though you REALLY don’t want to do it – well, television is like that. For the first few series me and Justin were their bitches, we wouldn’t say boo to a goose and we sucked it up big time. Then as the show became more and more successful we felt more inclined to put our foot down.
A good example is the ‘Coat of Cash’. For those readers not au fait with the ‘Coat of Cash’, basically Justin and I at the end of part one would put on a coat made entirely of five-pound notes, then we would run up the stairs through the centre of the audience whilst they would frantically try to grab a fiver off the coat. Now for the first few weeks this would be a surprise for the audience and people would quite tentatively grab a fiver here or there, but as the weeks went on, the coat of cash became legendary – not in the world of TV but on the streets. ‘What? A coat you say of free money? In Studio One, ITV Studios? I’m there.’ Soon we were attracting tramps and undesirables to the show, coming not to enjoy themselves but just to get free money. You could see people shamelessly turning up for Part One, grabbing a handful of money, shoving it in a carrier bag and then disappearing up the stairs and off home, leaving a smattering of empty seats for the remainder of the show. With the desire for free money increasing each week, so did the desperation, and it got to the point where the audience wasn’t so much an audience as – a mob. We were getting punched, kicked and dragged down the stairs. One time I was dragged UP the stairs by the baying mob – all for a fiver!! And don’t give me all this ‘Ooh, a fiver’s a lot of money’ – this was before the recession and food banks. The final straw for me was when I was pushed down the stairs and got my head caught in the cable of one of the studio cameras. As the crowd were yanking my legs (I don’t know why they were doing that, maybe they thought if they tugged my leg hard enough loose change might cascade down my trouser leg), I was slowly being garroted. The cameraman pushed the camera to one side and bent forward I thought to help me but instead picked a crisp five-pound note off my coat and popped it in his pocket – nothing, it seemed, was off limits when it came to tax-free wonga.
Me and Justin huddled together after the show. ‘We cannot carry on with this,’ we agreed.
‘I nearly died,’ I told the producer, showing the bite marks on my back. This is ten years ago and, sitting here writing it all down, sometimes I get little pricks from my conscience raising an eyebrow – ‘Really? You nearly got killed?’ – so it was very interesting when I recently went to the wedding of one of the researchers of The Friday Night Project and I was on the same table as some of the other team who had worked on the show. It was great to see them all grown up, some of them married, some of them with kids, and it was so nice reminiscing about our time on the show, but the one thing that dominated the chat was the ‘Coat of Cash’. Everyone said, ‘Oh, Alan – it was so dangerous – why did you even say yes to doing it?’ and I felt instant relief – I was right, it was bloody dangerous. One of them who still works in telly said that they were shown a health and safely video about what you can and can’t do in television and there was a clip of me in the ‘Coat of Cash’ being mauled, exemplifying what NOT to do.
Anyway, Justin and me said that we didn’t want to do it any more and the producers said that we could get a surprise masochist – er, sorry – guest to do the ‘Coat of Cash’. Usually they would be contestants freshly evicted from the Big Brother house. I remember one week it was Charley Uchea to do it. She had come across as very feisty and moody in the Big Brother house, which had made her a great reality TV contestant but maybe not such a good ‘Coat of Cash’ contestant. For the first time ever in the history of the ‘Coat of Cash’ people in the audience were bypassing the chance of free money and were just walloping her; she still had money left on the coat by the time she’d got to the top of the stairs. The poor girl looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. People were waving their handfuls of fivers in the air triumphantly and then we noticed that someone had pulled part of her weave off and was waving that around – we had to remind the audience that it was ‘Coat of Cash’ not ‘Coat of Weave’.
We had created a monster. Not only did people want money, they wanted more of it, and we started getting claims. One woman caught in the scrum had lost her ‘Tiffany’ necklace and wanted compensation – oh God, how awful, we thought – but what this claimant in the audience failed to understand was that in a TV studio you are more often than not being filmed by one camera or another and once we looked at the footage we discovered that she hadn’t been wearing any necklace in the first place, let alone a Tiffany one. The claimant then decided not to pursue compensation – funny that.
One poor woman was trampled and needed to be pulled from the crowd and given oxygen at the side of the stage. She kept giving off hints that it was a health and safety nightmare and that, you know, it shouldn’t really be allowed, and if she was that way inclined she could pursue litigation. When we watched the footage back we saw that, yes, the lady had been horribly crushed in the melee but not before she had thrown herself across three rows of chairs, basically crowd surfing, trying to grab a cheeky fiver. She too, once we showed her the footage, decided to let go of her dreams of a million-pound pay-out.
Slowly people’s opinion of the show started to become more positive and we even got some nice things said in the press about us. One of the things they honed in on was mine and Justin’s ‘bromance’. We did have a chemistry and it shouldn’t really have worked but it did. It wasn’t only the media that noticed us – we were soon getting asked about our availability for corporate work. ‘Do you have an act for corporate evenings?’ we would get asked. Some people might say we didn’t even have an act on the telly. Well, we didn’t – our unique selling point was our ability to bounce off each other in an unforced, unscripted way. I think if we’d actually thought about it and written an ‘act’ something would have been lost. Needless to say we still took the jobs.
These corporate evenings can take many guises but normally it’s where a company will pay for you to host their evening of entertainment and give awards out to their hard-working employees. These corporate events pay really well but sometimes you feel a bit dirty up there because you’re only doing it for the money – yes, I can be ruthless too. You’re often performing to a paralytic crowd who don’t really care about you, or the night, or the awards, and are only there so they can drink the profits dry of their employers. They know that you are only there for the money, that you are mercenary and that you might as well be Princess Leia chained to the engorged corporate bulk that is Jabba the Hutt, dancing your little gold bikini off. They are a complete riot but not in the good sense of the word – they are literally a riot. Have you ever seen those westerns where people are being punched, having chairs smacked over their backs and being thrown along the length of the b
ar? Well, just picture that but in suits. I remember doing a corporate event for Eddie Stobart lorries and the image of an obese knickerless woman doing ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ by herself on the dance floor will stay with me for a long time. Every time I pass a sinkhole I shiver.
For this particular corporate do I was co-hosting with my TV husband Justin in a very lavish marquee in the middle of Battersea Park and I was so sure we could rekindle the magic we had on the telly. We’d think of something, wouldn’t we? Well, in a word – no. We were screwed. The event was fast approaching and we didn’t have two punchlines to rub together. Justin had heard me singing Tina Turner’s ‘Steamy Windows’ through my dressing-room wall and it gave him an idea.
‘Al, let’s do “It Takes Two” – you do a great Tina Turner and I’ll be Rod Stewart. We can dress up, sing the song, funny and upbeat – just perfect.’
‘What a great idea! Everyone loves people dressing up. It’s going to bring the house down,’ I predicted.
So we rushed out to HMV to buy Rod Stewart’s Greatest Hits CD, thanking the Comedy Gods on high for their divine guidance in picking us a classic, soon to be legendary, comedy performance. Those Comedy Gods, they can be right fuckers, you know. We died a death. Ask any comedian and they’ll tell you that dying in front of an audience is the worst, but dying in drag is even worse; dying in front of an audience and in drag and having to carry on for the whole four minutes and seven seconds of the stupid song you’ve chosen is the epitomy of shit. We finished and no one clapped – no one! It was awful, plus the audience was full of famous people, and when I caught any of their eyes they did that pitiful look, where you half smile and roll your eyes. Me and Justin decided in the break to not take our wigs and outfits off – the twisted logic being that if we kept them on, the audience might think it was the genuine Tina Turner and Rod Stewart doing a really shit job and our careers would go unscathed.